


Wall

by thegoddamnknightshade



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Gen, Metaphor, Suicidal Ideation, Ten Years Later, dead dove do not eat!!!, if u squint, kinda Raleigh&Mako, sorta - Freeform, the anti-kaiju wall as metaphor, what for
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-24
Updated: 2016-12-24
Packaged: 2018-09-11 19:25:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,159
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9006871
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegoddamnknightshade/pseuds/thegoddamnknightshade
Summary: “I shouldn’t have come back,” he says, and it’s not a whisper.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Confabulatrix](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Confabulatrix/gifts).



They decommission The Wall.

Raleigh’s forgotten the actual name of the damn thing. It’s come to encompass so much else in his mind (Yancy, overwhelming despair at the loss of his brother, his partner, his brother, that fatalistic embrace of the end of the world) that the technical term no longer matters. He worked on it for years, and all he has to do is think of The Wall and he knows exactly which one. He knows exactly which hundred-yard stretch. He’s sure if he was dropped on a stormy Alaskan beach he’d find his way back to it, a beaten dog returning to its master’s hand. It’s been years and years and years. The Wall still lurks in the back of his mind. It’s a reminder of how low he can sink.

Everyone knows that he worked on The Wall, so ten years later--years after the victory tours, after the museum exhibits are built, after everyone’s calmed down and gone home (except Newt, that awful little fuck, who continues to pine for the Kaiju glory days, as if there was any glory)--ten years later they invite him (alone) to the decommissioning. It’s in the way of the new shipping lanes between Vladivostok and Anchorage. He thinks of Vladivostok and he thinks of the Kaidanovskys, and then he thinks of Crimson Typhoon torn to pieces in the lights of Hong Kong. It’s a landmine. It all leads to each other, down, down, down. 

He told Mako not to chase the rabbit, but here he was. Down, down, down.

The decommissioning. He gets off the plane at Juneau, takes the train to Sitka. Mako meets him there. Just because there’s no more kaiju in the immediate offing doesn’t mean that her skills at engineering jaeger tech have gone rusty. He wishes he were as driven as she is naturally. He’s just tired, but he feels better with her hand in his. Several miles inland, they stand beneath the balustrades of The Wall. Some puffed shirt talks about the sacrifices made to build the wall, like he even knows. Raleigh saw men fall to their deaths, hundreds of stories, falls that must have taken forever. Falls he fantasized about. What it would have been like to lurch sideways off a beam, unsecured, to leave his stomach behind two hundred stories up? His death would have been instant, like pudding. Or maybe that was just--

Mako squeezes his hand in hers. “Don’t chase the rabbit,” she says under her breath. There’s a different stuffed shirt talking now. Raleigh looks at the balustrades again. Like a cathedral, he thinks. He thinks it and then he doesn’t, swings Mako’s hand between them, just a little, a clock marking the seconds. She lets him. The stuffed shirt talks and Raleigh doesn’t listen.

Even through a mask, the light from a welding torch is brighter than stars. Don’t look, they say, but it draws the eye, and they weren’t much for training anyway. What would the stuffed shirt say if Raleigh climbed up there now and told them about seventeen-year-olds who took the job for the ration cards, for the freedom, for a new chance, and weren’t taught about the masks, who ended up blinded or worse? Bubbling flesh smells just like burnt bacon, and at so many stories up it’s impossible to, to, to do anything except knock the torch free and let it dangle and, what, endanger someone else’s life? No, no, better to let them fall. The splat at the end will sort them.

“I shouldn’t have come back,” he says, and it’s not a whisper. He says it at normal volume into a silent crowd. Heads turn. He’s telepathic, like he’s in the Drift with all of these know-nothings, a one-way neural handshake. Or a handshake where one hand’s all limp and the other’s trying so hard to make contact. They don’t know what he’s thinking, but he’s there, hearing them: No you shouldn’t have if you were going to behave like this. What does he know this great hero who’s never touched a wall never been scared. 

Like Raleigh hadn’t gone through the rift in the bottom of the ocean. Like he hadn’t seen great and alien creatures looming against a foreign sunset, the setting of a half-dozen suns, the red both virulent and vital as it bled into his eyes. A schoolyard fight on a galactic stage: he knew blood in the eyes. Six suns and then a seventh as Danger’s nuclear heart detonated. He hadn’t seen it. He’d felt it, the shockwave propelling him out of the Rift, like a mother shooing a child away from a monster. Without that push he’s sure the rift would’ve closed with him inside it. Then who would ruin this wall-decommissioning ceremony?

Ten years too late, an embarrassing afterthought. Oh, we thought you would’ve forgotten this, this embarrassing attempt to hide this war, to focus your attention on lesser things than the monsters beating down your door… Like children, if they hid under the blankets then they’d be safe from the creatures under the bed.

They push a ceremonial detonator. A great rift opens in the face of the wall. Raleigh watches it. The orange-gold-smoke-grey draws his attention with its suddenness. He gapes. Mako averts her eyes, maybe from him, maybe from the brightness. They’ve not drifted in decades, haven’t needed to. Raleigh doesn’t want to, not really. That time’s over. He’s glad for it.

Nothing collapses. Too dangerous. They’re too close. But the wall shrinks inward as the crowds disperse. They don’t even want Raleigh to say a few words to the wall he helped build. Did they ever mention the brave men and women who had died to raise the wall? Was it more or less than the dead jaeger pilots whose oversize sarcophagi littered the seafloor, or were interred in Oblivion Bay? He wants to ask. Mostly because he already knows the answer.

Nothing collapses except Raleigh, who realizes he’s sitting on his ass on the icy permafrost perhaps a while after it happens. Mako is standing by him in a blue greatcoat, like it’s ten years ago, like she still thinks he’s a great awful American lug. But her hand is on his shoulder, a comforting weight. She knows, that hand says. She’ll give him this time. Her thumb rubs little third-arcs on his shoulder. His peacoat is gray. Same color as the one he’d worn the day they met, if newer, if better quality. Next to that gray, her cold-chapped skin looks red and vital like a sun.

He turns his head and kisses her wrist. She startles, looks down to him.

“Do you want to stay until it’s done,” she asks.

“No,” he says. “When do you have to be back,” he asks.

She smiles. She says, “Not quite yet.”

They catch a shuttle back to Sitka together. The Wall continues to fall behind them.

**Author's Note:**

> I had this whole tortured Mako&Raleigh thing written up but last night I was laying in bed with strep and I thought, you know what this fandom needs? More manpain and existential terror because aliens are out there and they want to eat us. And I'm JUST THE MAN FOR THE JOB.
> 
> So you get this. Happy holidays, confabulatrix! We haven't met but my fiancee says you're nice :D
> 
> Beta'd by sputnikcentury, god bless her soul


End file.
